In agriculture, and particularly in the agricultural seed industry, high volume planting seed is generated by large seed manufacturers. The seed is loaded into seed boxes which typically include a base and a removable upper ring portion which sits on and engages the base thereby practically doubling the height and volumetric capacity of the box. Typical seed boxes store approximately 50 acres of seed and weigh a total of about 300 pounds, the upper ring weighing about 175 pounds.
Typical seed box upper rings are designed so they can be removed from the base, turned over 180 degrees so the internal cavity faces the base, and lowed down over the top of the base to nest thereby reducing the height of the boxes for compact storage and transportation.
When the seed box is to be filled, prior processes required two or more individuals to manually assemble the nested seed box. This required manually lifting and rotating the inverted ring and installing it on back on the base. On high volume seed manufacture, hundreds and hundreds of seed boxes are cycled every day and several thousand are typically in process at the manufacturing facility, in transport to buyers and farms, and/or in transport to be returned to the seed manufacturing for cleaning, refilling and/or temporary storage.
The present invention improves on prior equipment and processes which required burdensome operations which are slow, imprecise and required numerous human operators. Prior devices were often specific to a specific storage container and could not easily accommodate other containers. Prior devices were also not suitable for the high volume demands of modern manufacturing facilities.